We examine whether shared collective experiences can help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams' victories in sub- Saharan Africa. Combining individual survey data with information on official matches played between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals...

We examine the effect of malaria on economic development in Africa over the very long run. Using data on the prevalence of the mutation that causes sickle cell disease we measure the impact of malaria on mortality in Africa prior to the period in which formal data were collected. Our estimate is...

"Depetris-Chauvin et al. (2020) analyze the effects of football on civil conflict in Africa. We engage into a replication of their analysis. This unveils major inconsistencies between the sample selection criteria described in the article and the composition of the estimation sample (41 errors...

In their comment, Delpeyrou and Bertoli (2024) make several critiques of our paper (Depetris-Chauvin et al., 2020). In this reply, we show that: (i) Their purported "errors" in data construction are in the vast majority of cases simply the result of different (and, we argue, superior) choices in...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary non-civil conflict in Africa. Exploiting variations across artificial regions (i.e., grids of 50x50km) within an ethnicity's historical homeland, we document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict...